Becoming BYU in an Age of Artificial Intelligence

We are grateful today to be part of this aligning of our hearts and our minds, hoping they’ll be pure and firm with our prophets, seers, and revelators. Thank you, each of you, for who you are and how you are part of that process. President Reese, we thank you for your leadership—your enthusiastic, wonderful leadership! Commissioner James R. Rasband, we thank you likewise for yours. I am grateful to be here with academic vice president Justin Collings and with each of you.

We say that the world is our campus. Two weeks ago, Sister Gong and I left for Cambodia. We started with the open house of the Phnom Penh Cambodia Temple. Who would’ve imagined that there would be a temple in Phnom Penh? But there is. We then went to New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, and Australia and returned late on Saturday, very much looking forward to being with you here today.

Blessing Our Students to Believe, Belong, and Become

Not too long ago we were in Athens, and while we were there, the Acropolis reminded me of the aphorism based on Cicero about hearing and acting. Describing the contrast between these two actions, an orator said:

In classical times when Cicero had finished speaking, the people said, “How well he spoke”—but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said, “Let us march.”¹

Of course I dare not aspire to either—either that you would think that I speak well or that, based on what I say, you would be ready to march when I finish my remarks. But I can and do pray that in our time together the Holy Ghost will, in your heart and mind,

a. inspire and enable you to continue becoming a joyful, lifelong disciple of Jesus Christ.

b. invite you to nurture each BYU student to become an educated and devoted lifelong disciple of Jesus Christ.

c. in the process, encourage each of us to contribute to BYU becoming all it is meant to be in this age of artificial intelligence.

Recently I had the sacred assignment to dedicate the Harare Zimbabwe Temple. There I met a fine couple. The brother had served as a young missionary in Harare from 1975 to 1976. He loved the Lord, his mission, and the people. He decided then that he would return someday when a temple was dedicated in Zimbabwe.

Now, 50 years later, he and his wife attended the Harare Zimbabwe Temple dedication. I stand all amazed. This is what lifelong disciples of Jesus Christ look like. They are faithful and devout, they are good parents, they serve with commitment and joy in the Church, and they contribute professionally to their community—for 50 years and counting.

Wherever I am in the world, I love the greeting “President Gong, I was in your stake at BYU” or “Professor Gong, I was in your class at BYU.” Wherever we are—at an airport, stake conference, or leadership meeting—I love reconnecting with a faithful BYU-graduate father, mother, or both, often with children.

Each of you contributes to this covenant pattern.

A faithful missionary returns or comes to BYU. Through but beyond classes, homework assignments, labs, term papers, projects, internships, mentoring, midterms, finals, and graduation, we hope that he or she will accomplish three pivotal transitions:

First, nurture an unwavering faith in Jesus Christ.

Second, marry an eternal companion and forge a family. This starts, of course, with dating.

Third, gain an excellent education and prepare for a profession and a career.

We call these life transitions lifelong learning, spiritual foundation, gospel growth, and character.² As BYU employees, you each foster these transitions for our young people all along the way. You nurture faith, foster growth and character, and provide moral grounding. You teach our students to work hard, work smart, and exemplify Christlike character.

As faculty, staff, and administrators in and out of classrooms, during office hours, and within campus wards and stakes, your personal example means everything.

For example, you might make a simple comment or ask a simple question as class begins: “I loved today’s devotional” (meaning you attended or watched it) or “What did today’s devotional mean to you?” Or a simple, sincere comment about how you love your spouse or family can inspire a student. Your ministering attention can give confidence and hope.

As do you, I remember the faculty, staff, and administrators who blessed me when I was a student here.

Lorna Nielsen taught our freshman English class to analyze Wayne C. Booth’s rhetorical stance. Thanks to Richard Cracroft and many others, I still use the Aristotelian triangle of subject, audience, and voice.

My first BYU roommate was Ryan Thomas. Ryan’s father was Robert K. Thomas. As a freshman, I didn’t know what an academic vice president was, but when Ryan told me about an interesting new faculty member, I signed up for Arthur Henry King’s Book of Mormon class. Dr. King and many other BYU faculty nourished my beliefs and intellectual growth. For example, in a Shakespeare class, Dr. King taught us to make careful textual observations within a moral framework.

My first campus bishop was Merrill C. Oaks. As a new freshman priesthood quorum leader, when my quorum asked if I would invite Coach LaVell Edwards to come speak to our quorum, I called him. He answered. He graciously agreed. I still remember that he came and talked about beauty in nature—how all things denote and bear testimony of their Creator.

When I returned from my mission, I had a few hard days adjusting. (It’s why we tell mission leaders that the fourth year is the hardest.) Someone told me the dean of the Graduate School would understand. I did not know what a dean of the Graduate School did, but Dean Chauncey C. Riddle listened to me, and we cried together.

When I received a letter summoning me to the ASB to pay a fine for having more credits than I needed to graduate, a records and finance administrator helped in a kind and professional way. I grieved when I later read in the Daily Universe that she had died in a car accident in Spanish Fork.

Thank you for letting me focus on student experiences. As always, human relationships are at their core. I express deep gratitude for all you do, semester in and year out. Covenant community and covenant belonging bless our students to believe, belong, and become. Who you are—and the disciples of Jesus Christ that you are becoming—guides and inspires us all to become BYU.

As President Reese just noted, we have much for which to be grateful. Some 12 percent of our students are the first generation from their families to graduate from the university. As friends and role models, our extraordinary staff mentor 40–60 percent of our graduates whose lifelong education includes on-campus employment. As we have just heard, a full 76 percent of BYU graduates have enjoyed the educational environment that you enrich with high-impact practices such as research with faculty, internship or field experiences, or study abroad.

I am grateful BYU graduates learn from you that although life is busy, they can confidently say to their local bishop or branch president, “When the Lord has a calling for me, I would love to serve in our Church.” Thank you for serving in our stakes and wards. Thank you for laughing, crying, and growing with our students in family home evening groups, Church callings, and ministering assignments.

As you know, BYU enrolls in all degree programs 37,205 total daytime students as of fall 2025. Our faculty includes 1,858 instructional employees with 1,200 full-time and 900 part-time administrative staff. BYU’s 11 colleges and schools—the School of Medicine will make it 12—offer 29 doctoral programs, 95 master’s programs, and 202 undergraduate majors. You know all this. This is you.

In every program and major—in every campus service, employment opportunity, and extracurricular experience—we seek to foster BYU’s “double heritage,”³ develop “the courage to be different,”⁴ build a “no one sits alone” covenant community, invest in mission-inspired scholarship, and focus on mission-aligned hiring.

Artificial Intelligence: Defining Our Age and Time

This brings us to artificial intelligence, which is defining our age and time—and thereby influencing the education of every BYU student.⁵

Do you know what an “AI vampire” is? An AI vampire is someone who does not sleep at night because they are busy orchestrating AI agents. Recently my multitasking son told me he was simultaneously directing six sets of AI agents to write code for his context graphics company. Now, as a protective father, I asked my son if he is sleeping at night, and I also checked his teeth to see if they looked normal.

You may have noticed, as I did, that the recent G7 meeting attended by the heads of government of the world’s seven leading democratic economies—the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom—was also attended by the heads of the world’s leading AI labs, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Mistral, Google DeepMind, and Meta. It seemed symbolic to see the sovereigns of geography sit with the sovereigns of artificial intelligence, as AI is influencing the future of economy, society, and national security in all the ways it is.⁶

We, of course, are also aware that AI is increasingly shaping the way we perceive what is real and unreal, true and untrue, fleeting and enduring and also the relationships we hold most important, including faith and family, and the ways we work and organize society. In various ways, AI influences the core relationships we and our students hold with Deity (Thou), the self (I), society and others (they), and the natural environment (it).

With that context, let me offer two kinds of thought propositions:

First, I believe AI will influence every course, every discipline, every degree, and every future family, community, and workplace environment for our students, employees, and community.

Second, I believe the coming of AI to the futures of all our students, employees, and associates is one of the greatest opportunities we have at Brigham Young University and in the Church Educational System.

We can embrace this opportunity. It gives us the opportunity to reexamine, reimagine, and reaffirm our educational principles, purposes, and processes as well as our means and ends.

Let’s consider four framing questions about AI and education at BYU:

1. How should AI influence our students and us as faculty, staff, and administrators? This includes AI literacy, AI policies in our classes and workplaces, and future student preparation.

2. Thinking as faculty and staff, departments, and colleges, how should AI influence our courses, disciplines, and degrees?

3. At the BYU institutional level, how should AI influence our guiding principles and values, curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, lifelong learning, and time to and preparation for graduation and professions and careers?

4. How can BYU contribute to society’s conversations on human identity, human dignity, and human flourishing in an age of AI? Estimates vary as to when, but many experts anticipate we will see some kind of AGI (artificial general intelligence, in which AI performs most intellectual tasks that humans can perform) and possibly also ASI (artificial super intelligence, which surpasses human intelligence across nearly all domains).

So let’s look again, in a little more detail, at our four framing questions.

1. How Should AI Influence Our Students and Us as Faculty, Staff, and Administrators?

First question: How should AI influence our students and us as faculty, staff, and administrators? How do we prepare our students for AI literacy and use today as they become future informed parents, employees, and citizens?

To begin, we can remind our students that AI is not human. AI is mathematical algorithms, and mathematical algorithms are not alive.

May I suggest that BYU faculty, staff, and administrators have a wonderful opportunity, a challenge, and a responsibility to help prepare our students to live and thrive in an AI world.

To me, it is hard to completely ban AI from our classrooms and expect our students to learn how to use this impactful technology.

Likewise, however exuberant we may be about AI, to me it seems premature to declare AI will soon bring easy abundance and leisure—in which we only sip lemonade and sit in lounge chairs, as in the 2008 movie WALL-E.

From our own balanced experiences, can we convey that we are neither afraid of AI nor do we think AI answers everything? That we understand AI is neither the sum of nor the solution to all our problems or opportunities?

AI policies in our classes and workplaces can help and encourage our students to use AI appropriately, ethically, and productively. We want to enhance critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity. Many believe that students who use AI do better than students who do not use AI but that students who use AI somehow use it to gain unfair or unethical advantage.

Can we give BYU students a principle-based understanding of how to use AI appropriately—now in their studies and classes and in the future in their families, professions, and core relationships? They’re going to need to learn how to use it. Let’s teach them to use it here.

Our students will learn AI principles from you and your example, from what you do and how you do it, from what you say and don’t say, and from how you say or don’t say it.

Let me suggest that you become acquainted with basic AI so you can speak from some firsthand experience. Have an AI policy in your classes. It may be as direct as “Do your own work.” If AI can help your students learn and grow, invite them to use it. But help your students become knowledgeable, responsible, and accountable for how they use AI. Help them learn to use AI to deepen their experience with the real world, to hone their reasoning skills, and to do their own work, such that they do not become lazy, dependent, or dishonest in describing AI’s work as their own.

Now we all know these are not simple issues. They will require our best, continuing efforts. For example, the 2026 report from the international Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) noted that some students will use AI to “take shortcuts, avoiding the productive struggle and cognitive effort needed for learning and durable knowledge and skill acquisition.”⁷ Student dependency on AI can bring “metacognitive laziness” and “cognitive offloading.”⁸ But we also know, in contrast, that students who write their own papers preserve “higher levels of [cognitive] activation and recall.”⁹

We can distinguish outputs and outcomes. Where are we completing tasks (outputs)? Where are we nurturing learning outcomes—for example, communicating a studied subject to a specific audience with our authentic, personal voice?

We may find ourselves returning to basics and fundamentals—which, though real work, can also be grand fun!

2. How Should AI Influence Our Courses, Disciplines, and Degrees?

Second question: Thinking as faculty and staff, departments, and colleges, how should AI influence our courses, disciplines, and degrees?

As we prepare students for an AI world, we may find AI influences in varying ways in every course, discipline, and degree here at BYU.

For the disciplines of science, engineering, computer science, and so on, we already know that AI is reshaping methodologies and capacities. As artificial intelligence learns to speak the language of nature, AI is iteratively solving complex multi-domain problems. AI is writing its own code, recursively improving AI. Imagine: AI writing AI.

Capable AI agents and orchestrated AI systems are transforming many careers and professions. Orchestrated AI agents learn context, understand business processes, and use tools to perform professional tasks that heretofore have been in the human knowledge domain and process.

The AI toolbox of the future may well be filled with agentic advanced functions called strategy, human resources, finance, accounting, marketing, management, operations, economics, and so on. Orchestrated agentic AI flows will perform many aspects of today’s work—and also open more wonderful opportunities for humans than we have yet to imagine.

The word tokenomics is a mash-up between the use or spending of AI tokens and economics. The realities of tokenomics are that human skill sets and labor markets will have many, many new opportunities through using AI. Skilled humans and capable AI agents will work side by side. Even in hybrid workplaces, humans will play key roles to envision, design, decide, and implement system and process priorities and objectives.

Whatever their discipline, will you please teach every BYU student to work hard, to work smart, and to exemplify Christlike character, including responsibility, accountability, and integrity? BYU students who exemplify these qualities will always be in high demand.

3. How Should AI Influence Our Guiding Principles and Values, Curriculum, Pedagogy, Assessment, Lifelong Learning, and Time to and Preparation for Graduation and Professions and Careers?

Third question: At the BYU institutional level, how should AI influence our guiding principles and values, curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, lifelong learning, and time to and preparation for graduation and professions and careers?

Earlier this year, on April 27, 2026, BYU academic vice president Justin Collings spoke about the BYU Aims and AI at an all-faculty meeting in which he also addressed the doctrine of becoming—based on agency, accountability, and work.¹⁰

A UNESCO educational report on the future of assessment noted, “When the final artifact (e.g., essay, solution, or creative work) becomes an unreliable indicator of student learning, the journey of development takes on greater significance.”¹¹ “The journey of [student learning] takes on greater significance.” We’ve always known that. We have an opportunity to notice and to focus on that even more.

We can ask ourselves how AI may influence current and future BYU institutional strategic objectives. For example, we may ask how we can

• reduce time to graduation and increase graduation rates.
• emphasize covenants.
• improve retention (including first-year retention) and graduation job placement.
• increase faith, leadership, intellect, purpose, and resilience.
• develop disciples, leaders, and teaching- focused faculty.

We also ask: Regarding institutional aims, learning outcomes, faith and character development, and preparation for lifelong learning, family, employment, and Church service, what principles will and can we identify and teach our students to best prepare them as AI continues to evolve?

As BYU develops and implements its AI guiding principles, these principles may reflect in some ways the “Principles for Church Use of Artificial Intelligence,”¹² which the Church has established and periodically updates. But of course BYU’s principles would be tailored for its own educational circumstances, use cases, and needs.

What an exciting opportunity to review our classical educational and civilizational heritage! Identifying what makes us human equips us for the future. We can reimagine the classical trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. We can redefine a modern quadrivium of mathematical arts, including numbers, uncertainty, computation, and systems; natural sciences; social sciences; and the humanities. We need to include the great books and classical literature with their full breadth of human experience, wisdom, and cautionary tales.¹³

In conversations with AI labs, I’m often asked what it is that we might do to help give AI models and personas moral grounding and moral compass. I’ve suggested that we reenthrone our legacy human well-spring sources of imagination, aspiration, inspiration, and courage.

For example, think what we learn from rich, authentic, human, and humane examples drawn from humanity’s experiences, virtues, and values.

Now of course we begin with scripture and the words of the prophets and the apostles. But it seems to me that we also need (dare we even begin?) Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, and Frost. We need Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Willa Cather. We need Borges, Achebe, Gandhi, Tagore, Omar Khayyam, Al-Ghazali, Confucius, and Laozi. We need Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, and Snow White. We need Ruth, Naomi, Esther, and much, much more. We’ve only touched on literature but have art, music, and so on as well.

Knowledge philosopher Michael Polanyi—whose work I first became acquainted with here at BYU—reminded us that we often cannot articulate in words things we want to share. We can only demonstrate, transmit, and learn them by lived example.¹⁴ That’s what we do. We’re the living examples of these things we’re trying to share.

We’re grateful that BYU students are taught to reason and communicate clearly with precision and knowledge and to become individuals who live joyfully and abundantly with faith, generosity, compassion, discernment, and judgment. Servant disciples of Jesus Christ will need persistence, resilience, creativity, expertise, integrity, and every Christlike attribute.

Especially in an age in which AI will reason better than many humans, a distinguishing characteristic of our BYU students will be who they are and how they live “at all times and in all things, and in all places.”¹⁵

BYU students will not define themselves by what AI is or isn’t but by what we as children of God are uniquely meant to be and become. At its core, a BYU education in the age of AI can help our students

• protect and promote human moral agency to become and do good. We can use AI to (a) enhance individual effort and work; (b) champion human dignity, value, and worth as intrinsic, innate, and divine; (c) balance AI efficiencies and individual opportunity; and (d) define and pursue the gift of possibility to promote human flourishing.
• recognize the need for moral grounding and moral compass in AI—human values needed for moral judgment such as integrity, compassion, truthfulness, intuition, and leadership—and also recognize when these are absent.

We can help our students understand that there are aspects of AI black boxes that we do not fully comprehend. There are limits to what even the most sophisticated mathematical algorithms can do.

Can a BYU education give our students roots and wings—roots to anchor them in unchanging truths and wings to soar with new possibilities? These discussions will naturally and necessarily involve every disciple of Jesus Christ in every discipline across campus.

4. How Can BYU Contribute to Society’s Conversations on Human Identity, Human Dignity, and Human Flourishing in an Age of AI?

This leads us to our fourth and final question. How can BYU contribute to society’s conversations on human identity, human dignity, and human flourishing in an age of AI?

It is not by coincidence that, “for such a time as this,”¹⁶ Restoration scripture teaches that body and spirit constitute the soul, that spiritual growth and character develop through intentional moral choice for good, and that God-given agency and Jesus Christ’s Atonement are central to God’s plan of happiness.

We know that

• “the elements are eternal, and spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fulness of joy.”¹
• “the glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth.”¹⁸
• “intelligence . . . was not created or made, neither indeed can be.”¹⁹
• intelligence, truth, and light cleave unto each other.²⁰
• “whatever principle of intelligence we attain unto in this life, it will rise with us in the resurrection.”²¹

We are also blessed with a clear understanding of divine identity and divine potential. We have more to plumb and make real in our BYU educational offerings because of the divine truth that every BYU student, faculty, staff, and campus community member is “a child of God, a child of the covenant, and a disciple of Jesus Christ.”²²

I have long loved President Henry B. Eyring’s BYU devotional address titled “A Child of God.”²³ In a profound way, President Eyring taught about the identity and potential we each have as a child of God that can enable us simultaneously to pursue educational excellence while maintaining humility. (It seems to me that sometimes we think we are to pursue excellence Monday through Saturday and to speak of humility only on Sunday.)

In contrast, President Eyring said:

But I will tell you that not only can you pursue educational excellence and humility at the same time to avoid spiritual danger but that the way to humility is also the doorway to educational excellence.²⁴

President Eyring underscored that knowing we are each a child of God “can produce a powerful blend of courage and meekness.”²⁵ President Eyring’s five “habits of great learners” can continue to help us “forge a [BYU] learning community.”²⁶

What characterizes great learners and, may I ask, great teachers in an age of artificial intelligence? We can apply President Eyring’s five characteristic behaviors:

1. Great learners and great teachers “welcome correction.”

2. Great learners and great teachers “keep commitments.”

3. Great learners and great teachers “work hard.”

4. Great learners and great teachers “help other people.”

5. Great learners and great teachers expect and overcome resistance.²⁷

Coming full circle, as President Dallin H. Oaks has taught here on this campus, we especially need faith, humility, willingness to seek help from each other, and patience to fulfill our full educational potential as great learners and great teachers.²⁸

Made in the image of God our Creator with covenant belonging defining our core relationships, we have everything to look forward to. May we wisely approach and use this time of great opportunity. The Lord will guide and bless us. Our focus and purpose will be to bless His sons and daughters through all their experiences at BYU—and thereby His children in many places around the world—as Brigham Young University becomes all it is meant to be in an age of artificial intelligence.

I pray this in the sacred and holy name of Jesus Christ, amen.

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